" thority, which every man was at liberty to receive or reject, as he approved or disapproved the doctrine. Christians, on the other hand, made a very ill use of revelation and reason both. Instead of employing the superior principle to direct and confine the inferior, they employed it to sanctify all that wild imagination, the passions, and the interests of the ecclesiastical order suggested. This abuse of revelation was so scandalous, that while they were building up a system of religion, under the name of Christianity, every one who sought to signalize himself in the enterprise, and they were multitudes, dragged the Scriptures to his opinion, by different interpretations, paraphrases, and comments. Arius and Nestorius both pretended that they had it on their sides: Athanasius and Cyril on theirs. They rendered the Word of God so dubious, that it ceased to be a criterion, and they had recourse to another, to councils and the decrees of councils. He must be very ignorant in ecclesiastical antiquity, who does not know by what intrigues of the contending factions, for such they were and of the worst kind, these decrees were obtained and yet an opinion prevailing that the Holy Ghost, the same divine spirit who dictated the Scriptures, presided in these assemblies and dictated their decrees, their decrees passed for infallible decisions, and sanctified, little by little, much of the superstition, the nonsense, and even the blasphemy which the fathers taught, and all the usurpations of the Church. This opinion prevailed, I 2 and and influenced the minds of men, so powerfully, and so long, that Erasmus, who owns, in one of his letters, that the writings of Oecolampadius, against transubstantiation, seemed sufficient to seduce even the elect," ut seduci posse videan tur etiam electi," declares in another, that nothing hindered him from embracing the doctrine of Oecolampadius, but the consent of the Church to the other doctrine, "nisi obstaret consensus ecclesiæ." Thus artificial theology rose on the demolitions, not on the foundations, of Christianity; was incorporated into it, and became a principal part of it. How much it becomes a good Christian to distinguish them in his private thoughts; at least, how unfit even the greatest, the most moderate, and the least ambitious of the ecclesiastical order are to assist us in making this distinction, I have endeavoured to show you by reason and by example. It remains, then, that we apply ourselves to the study of the First Philosophy, without any other guides than the works and the word of God. In natural religion the clergy are unnecessary, in revealed they are dangerous guides. ESSAY THE FIRST: CONCERNING THE NATURE, EXTENT, AND REALITY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. SECTION I. AMONG the many cavils that have been de vised against the demonstrated existence of a first, intelligent, self-existent Cause of all things, this has been one; that things known must be anterior to knowledge, and that we may as well assert, that the images of objects we see reflected made those objects, as that knowledge or intelligence made them. Hobbes is accused of reasoning on this principle in his Leviathan, and his book De Cive, by the author of the Intellectual System of the Universe; and his argument in the place, where he mentions the notions that reason dictates to us concerning the divine attributes, is thus stated. "Since knowledge and 66 intelligence are nothing more in us than a "tumult of the mind, excited by the pressure of "external I 4 |